Embodiments of the invention relate generally to diagnostic imaging and, more particularly, to a system and method for analyzing and visualizing enumerated information.
Clinical information regarding a patient is often collected and stored in an enumerated format, such as a binary format, for example. Binary clinical data is typically viewed by healthcare professionals in a tabular format, as illustrated in Table 1. While such a method of display appears straightforward, many drawbacks are inherent in the simplicity of the display method.
TABLE 1Prior Art Display of Test ResultsClinical TestResponseResponse KeyImage Test 1YY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableImage Test 2NY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableImage Test 3YY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableImage Test 4YY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableImage Test 5YY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableClinical ResponseNY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableTest 1Clinical ResponseNY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableTest 2Clinical ResponseYY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableTest 3Clinical ResponseYY = Yes; N = No; −4 = Not AvailableTest 4
As illustrated in Table 1, a tabular display of binary data illustrates little importance of the data. As such, the tabular display may obscure the importance and relevance of a particular test result. Unless a healthcare or other professional viewing the data knows what each test is designed for and what each response corresponds to, the data is essentially meaningless.
Also, with the networking of medical devices, healthcare professionals have access to test results that may not fall within their area of expertise. While it may be possible for a healthcare professional to understand the meaning of all types of test results, such understanding takes time and experience. For example, sometimes the “good” or “normal” response to one binary question is “Yes” while the “good” response to another binary question is “No.” A healthcare professional typically learns this information over years of experience.
Further, the amount of data that a healthcare professional has available continues to increase, the size of spreadsheets containing the binary data increases and it becomes increasingly difficult for healthcare professionals to distinguish trends or patterns in the binary data. A tabular display of binary data does not typically provide any indication of the significance of the data or indicate whether the clinical data is consistent with a reference baseline. That is, the tabular display may not provide any indication of whether a patient's clinical data deviates from the norm.
Accordingly, there is a need to present enumerated data to a user in a manner that allows the user to quickly glean information from the data, understand the relative significance of a multitude of enumerated results, and correlate the results with a reference.
Therefore, it would be desirable to design a system and method analyzing and visualizing enumerated clinical data that overcome the aforementioned drawbacks.